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Finally set my PS4 up today, eager to try out Overwatch with a fibre connection, to find Mad Max available as an April free title!
W00t, it’s a game I’ve been meaning to pick up since it launched, but I’ve always had other games that have been on my radar to pick up.

In the same instance I was disappointed to find Ratchet and Clank was given away last month, together with Bloodborne.
I never played R&C before, and think it a title I could play with the boy, and Bloodborne would have been cool to download to encourage me to complete it… maybe after Dark Souls 3 eh? 🙂

I’m more frustrated that Sony don’t allow you to download feature games that you have missed in a month, but I really can’t complain about the volume and quality of games that I have available

After nearly 5 weeks of playing Elite Dangerous, over the course of over 3 years, CMDR BadKitty has finally made it to Elite status 🙂
During this time I had an epiphany that the game was such a time sink that I picked up playing guitar, and we had Player 3 join our family; that has curbed my play time quite a bit, no loss to the joy he brings into my life 🙂

After receiving the Explorer rank, finished off by running VIP passenger missions from Robigo to Sothis, I visited Shinrarta_Dezhra, Founders World, and picked up my first of the Big 3 ships, an Anaconda… solely for the reason of seeing how far a jump range I could get out of it fully engineered; currently I’m sitting at ~65ly, it makes the galaxy seem a smaller place 🙂

My next plan is to build up my materials and max engineer each of my ships before joining the narrative, time allowing.

For pretty much the entire month of March Elite Dangerous is the only game I’ve been playing, and I’ve had heaps of fun 🙂

Also picked up a new Logitech G610, my first mechanical keyboard!
I’ve always refused to pay out for a decent keyboard in the past; but thought now as I can touch type (ish) & I’ve resisted upgrading my existing box, why not treat myself 🙂
Loving it so for, no issues, and find the scroll volume dial a great useful option.

& we have fibre, no longer part of the internet third World, 200 Mbps down, but only 20 up.
I’ve requested an upgrade to 1Ghz but still waiting, but it’s changed my digital life… although not had the chance to try out Street Fighter and Overwatch on the PS4 as yet to see if it improves my game play.

So Elite, I was out running Sothis Ceos passenger missions in my Clipper after the Beyond Chapter One update, pretty much the groove I’ve been in for a while. Not doing too bad for credits per hour, and inching up my Federation ranking with the aim one day of picking up a Corvette.

Then I heard of the Oxley Skimmer mission Gold rush, and thought I’d take a look. The server was grinding for me, but I managed to head over to the system, increase my local rank, and run enough missions to increase my bank account by a couple of million credits. Stink that I was away camping in the days that followed, when I returned a patch had been placed, temporarily removing all skimmer missions.

So I didn’t make the multi billions of some players, but I couldn’t complain, I’d earned in a couple of laggy hours that would have taken me 10 hours on my current route… so what was I to do with all of this cash?

First I tried pimping out my Clipper, but the shields just weren’t strong enough to keep me for long enough in a Combat Zone. To try and remedy this I worked with a couple of engineers, but this still wasn’t enough… and why did I leave engineering so long?

Then a bright idea crossed my mind; I could buy other ships, rather than saving for the elusive Corvette. Having tried a Python once before, but it wasn’t A rated so it was quite sluggish, thought why not give it another try. So now kitted out in a A class Python, with some cool Farseer engineering. As a test flight I went out to the Pratchett Disk, and then cruised around the edge of the bubble, with pleasant 20 light year jumps. I ran in to no problems, and enjoyed the experience, but then I fitted 5 First Class passenger pods, and went back to running Sothis Ceos, contented making more money than I could with the Clipper, but still a little restless.

Wanting to see what the Python was like in battle I kitted it out with engineered Beams and Multi Cannons. This was enough to fend off attackers on my luxury cruise route, but I had the idea that I could do better, and I still had a pot of cash to spend 🙂

So a Fer-de-Lance was added to my star port garage, just in time for the last Ross 310 CG. Kitted out with engineered A rated modules I had heaps of fun in the combat zones, although questioning my logic of buying an FDL rather than the new battle orientated Chieftain… next purchase maybe 🙂

Once I’d reached the top 50% I’d grown tired of continuous battle and fancied another change. Before picking up the Clipper I’d been flying an Asp, iirc before the Explorer version was available. As I was working on unlocking Engineers, and my Python sojourn had kindled my desire for exploring again, I decided to rise up to Engineer Palin’s invite of travelling beyond 5,000 light years from the starting system.

First I was humbled to see that I hadn’t gone this far in the 2 years I’ve been playing the game, I’d not even gone over a thousand! But this time I had an engineered Asp Explorer that could jump 50 light years at a time, and I’d found the awesome option within the Galaxy map to limit the path to only stars that I could refuel from!

Now I didn’t need to lug about excessive fuel tanks, and now the fear of running out of fuel was abated; let the journey commence 🙂

There is a asteroid station just over 5k light years out, in system Omega Sector VE-Q b5-15 which made a perfect target. After modding my usual bubble touring setup to include a couple of auto repairs and chaff launchers… learning later that the reloads of both can be engineered, as can oxygen refill. It’s like this game doesn’t want you to die, and is encouraging you to explore 😉

So off I set, scanning each system, nearly every star, and heaps of planets. Only crashed into one star on the was out close to my destination. No issues on the way back, except I burned 2 of my chaffs in error when I should have been scanning.

The idea was then to head back, swap ships for my Python, and then acquire 25 fragmented sensors to fully unlock Palin, before turning in my cartography finds. I was really in 2 minds if this would be of great benefit, as I didn’t want to lose my finds; not due to ~5 million credits, but there were so many first discoveries, and I want the name of CMDR BADKITTY to be read long after I stop playing the game.

However the 22 light year jump range of my Python made the decision for me, and I removed the auto repair and chaff modules, lightening up my ship and giving me a little luggage space and auto dock… did I mention I had cartography data I didn’t want to lose 🙂

So off I set to find sensor fragments, and I’d been tipped off on a location HIP 17403, planet A4, coordinates -34.98 / -141.41.

This is where things got really cool, heading into the system I was pulled out of inter-system hyperdrive journey by 2 Thargoids. My ship shut down and they scanned me, only for it to power back up after they had found nothing of interest. I didn’t have a wake scanner on board to inspect all that they had left… but I’m interested in why they wouldn’t have attacked and destroyed me… guess they’re not so aggressive?

Arrive at the targeted planet I found a signal to not that the planet had a Thargoid crash site, and I headed down to the surface. I could find approximately where I needed to be from the coordinates, but couldn’t find an actual site. I figured out that if I stuck to the cardinal compass points only one of the long / lat cordinates would change, but I was buggered if I could find the place. I resorted to landing and making an epic trip into and across a crater to a location that I swear I’d checked out from the air.

I blasted the Thargoid scanners to retrieve the required fragments, taking one full scanner; until I started taking hanger damage, so I dropped it. Now I know I can buy a protected hanger from Palin to pick these up. I called back my ship and blasted back into space, one jump to meet Palin, hand over the 25 sensor fragments, sell him my cartography, and see what upgrades are available.

This is where I left off last night, searching for more class 5 materials to finish off my G5 FSD, now wondering what to do next; unlock another engineer, run passenger missions to acquire more materials, pick up a Chieftain or max out and iCourier?

Think this wall of text shows how much I’m still loving the game, certainly now I’ve found I can watch Youtube / Netflix while flying around, and there’s so much more to uncover… I really should unpack my PS4 🙂

I finally got around to installing Arch on Virtual Box, I followed this guide from addictivetips that was simple… although the updates seemed to take an age.

First impressions are that I like it, I’m impressed with the bare simplicity, maybe even enough to try it as a primary OS.

One thing that I did take back to Ubuntu was the KDE Plasma Desktop. I’m not fully sure what I think about it as an option long term, as I’ve grown to like my Gnome 3 desktop, with the Unity like setup.

I do like the clean line styles, and access to widgets, I’m not too impressed with the alt+tab window switch view… but I’m sure this is tweakable, and is certainly no deal breaker.

Off to see how I can play with the setup and widgets, hopefully be able to get KDE Connect to work

I can’t get to Chapter One

I started playing the new Elite: Dangerous DLC yesterday Beyond – Chapter One… after I spent a couple of hours setting up my controls.

In the end, not for the first time, I plugged in a PlayStation 4 joypad. This time though Windows 10 and Steam identified the pad, rather than having to use a third party piece of software… who iirc I’d contributed to in the past.

It was late, so no time for space travel last night; today when I’ve booted up Elite: Dangerous I can’t log onto the server.

At first I thought it was my password that I could have been entering wrong, due to my keyboard has bust, I’m now running with a spare on which the top row numbers don’t work, and in turn the symbols.

Resetting the password didn’t work.

The time was wrong on the desktop, correcting this didn’t help.

I’m guessing the popularity of the update is bringing back the user base, and living in the arse end of beyond I’m too far from the servers, so one of the first to be dropped.

I hope to have the chance to play over the weekend, let’s hope the servers are quieter.

The app is described as “a powerful OS image flasher built with web technologies to ensure flashing an SDCard or USB drive is pleasant and safe experience. It protects you from accidentally writing to your hard-drives, ensures every byte of data was written correctly and much more.”

Status

w00t Blanka has arrived, he’s more awesome than ever, and I’m up to the 9th Colossus!

Edit: Now off to find the 10th 🙂
9th was my favourite so far; the journey to it was cool and a little different, with more steps to taking down the Colossi… although once I’d reached the weak spot it was an easy take down

solution

when selected it Windows claimed there was an error on the drive, but all this caused was to reboot several times, and roll back the changes

back in Ubuntu I checked dmesg

all this showed was a known AMD graphics card error, nowt to worry about,
or show what the hard drive issue was

next step was to check fstab to see if the partition was listed

had to force my way in: sudo nano /etc/fstab

here was my first clue, there were no deets listed for the partition in question

from the terminal I ran sudo blkid to find the relevant UUID

back in fstab I made the addition:#Entry for /dev/sd## :
UUID="HEX_CODE" /media/sd## ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_NZ.UTF-8 0 0

still no success, still not writable 🙁

refusing to give up, it was the wrong side of midnight, I pulled out the big guns with sudu su, and ran sudo chown -R 777 /media/sd##

returned by to the normal user to find all rights had been restored 🙂 …
although I haven’t booted Windows 10 as yet to see if there are any implications, but even if they are, I now know how to fix it 🙂

So excited, Blanka is coming;

I’ve just earned enough FM from playing through survival with each character; it seems like the records are wiped each season, which makes more opportunity to make in game currency.

Stoked I don’t have to shell out any cash top play my favourite main from SFiv 🙂

“In SFV: AE, Blanka is living peacefully with his mother, and has adapted well to being introduced back into society. One day, a suspicious salesman approaches him and offers a way to make Blanka famous by mass producing a doll made in Blanka’s likeness. Will it work? Find out in his character story mode.”

Great to see all of his SFiv signature moves still there, with pretty much the same input, balls electric and all… but then they’ve given him a command throw to fuck with opponents even more, and his V-SKILL / V-TRIGGER / CRITICAL ART are truly wild.

And did I mention that his CA is QCF QCF Punch 🙂

I’ve had SFV from release, but it’s not felt complete without Blanka, 5 more days!

Picked up Shadow of the Colossus at the weekend…

impressive as the last 2 versions I’ve bought, but now with more detailed graphics and intuitive controls.

I’m up to the 6th Colossi resisting searching for guide, tackling each as I find them. Some have alluded me more than others, but I’m still enjoying the experience and challenge.

Status

Playing A variety of games from my back catalogue; although I’ve wanted to pick up Doom and Persona 5, I’m resisting for just now.

So what has been taking up my time…

When games are more of an experience

As Shadow of the Colossus is due out in the next week I thought I’d make a concerted effort to finish The Last Guardian

Not sure why I stopped playing… actually I do, I was stuck finding a route, with no success each time I loaded the game; this time would be different 🙂

I’m now a couple more hours in, and am again blown away by the Trico animation and scale. I had little love for the control mechanisms, but now that I’ve patience with the pace of the story, and companion beast, it’s not so irritating.

I find some of the environments vertigo inducing, the valley panoramas are impressive, and I’ve been known to sit ‘the boy’ down into a meditation state to enjoy the view while I have a cuppa.

So beyond the giant feathered mammal like quadruped (griffin?) what else I like is the Princess Bride like narrative… although in Japanese, and the platform challenges with the boy reminiscent of a evolved original Prince of Persia.

I like the vulnerability of the human lead, together with the power and fragility of the oppressed Trico. How Trico’s eyes and horns reflect his (her?) mood

Then there are the little things; blue butterflies in fluttering in the sun like something from a 90’s John Woo film, and the soaring birds dotted around the open chasms and sky.

I’m keen to read what other people think of the game, but I don’t want the experience trashed by spoilers. Although I feel a little silly having this predicament a year after release having still not finished it 🙂

The Last Guardian is totally an interactive work of art and novel more than a game, and I’m now tempted to pick up a PS4 Pro to see the game in higher res & try the virtual experience.

If there is any ‘game’ to play of the PS4, I think this is it
Rating:Rating:(unfinished)

Capcoms cash cow

SFV Arcade… hate the in game currency, and will not give Capcom any more cash for characters; this sales model stinks! So I’ve been playing with a variety of characters to increase my stash of cash to pick up Blanka on his release.

Quite excited to have the green jungle boy back in the ring, as he was my main for years on each iteration of SFIV

My heart races before each on-line fight, such a rush… and because of this fix and endorphin rush reinforces why I won’t pay for more DLC.

killer crossover

Still finishing of tasks in FFXV, although this months play time was at the Assassins Festival… I didn’t have chance to finish the challenge there, hope the time limit hasn’t prevented this, as I missed the last festival too 🙁

Don’t call me Shirley

Completed Call of Duty Modern Warfare to justify picking up another title, but I’ve had no need! Did love the enhanced remake, brought back good memories. I’ve enjoyed going back to the on-line multiplayer, remembering terms like ‘grandmas house’ made me smile.

Game log

Sticking to my pledge that I must finish a game before i pick up a new one, I planned on making a concerted effort to finish FFXV

I entered the final chapter, after completing the 2 available DLC’s, and had my arse handed to me! Scarpered back to the open world to level up and do a bit of fishing 🙂

Loved the DLC backstories, although have Ignis’s still to play through, and the option to switch characters in battle makes it so much more interesting that sometimes I don’t even use the ring of Lucil 😉

New house with faster unlimited internet so went back to my passion, getting my arse kicked on Street Fighter V online 🙂

Grinning through each fight, learning from my defeats, gone back to Ken to get up to speed. This works out OK until i meet anther Ken… it seems like a Barbie convention at times 🙂

As a gamer who doesn’t have much time to invest I really disapprove of Capcom’s model of earning / paying for new characters; if i didn’t enjoy the game so much I’d have ditched it by now, fuck them.

My darling wife doesn’t like my boy to watch fighting games (kicking and punching men as she calls it), so i spent an hour with him playing PaRappa the Rapper 2.

I beat all my expectations and worked through to the fifth level without loss, shit yeah,
this could be the next game I complete!

The boy loved the songs and animation too, perhaps a better choice of title for toddlers?

Then I’ve been distracted by the remastered Modern Warfare campaign… I forgot how well scripted the story is, loved the challenge and variety of the missions, it brought back so many fun memories of the crew i used to play with on xbox live… but I just couldn’t motivate myself to begin All Ghillied Up

For quick games I’ve been jumping on Overwatch to play the festive Yeti game… I make an abominable snowman, and also the odd game of Rocket League
& I’ve recently discovered Live Coding, more on that soon 🙂

So excited, I managed to reserve a Mini SNES, should have it tomorrow 🙂

Looking forward to introducing the boy to all of the classics I loved as a kid, and from what I’ve read (Reddit.com/MiniSNES) Nintendo left it open to load ROMS onto it, as with the mini NES… so many games to play!

I’ve been having on and off issues wit h my PC… well mainly off issues when it overheats while running Déjà Dup backup.

Today I’ve refitted the heat sink, cleaned off the old thermal paste, and fitted a new fan, as the one that came with the case was poor and far too load.

Machine is now running heaps quieter and cooler + I’m now using borg backup, which doesn’t seem as resource heavy on a single core.

Picked up Horizon Zero Dawn again, turned down the difficulty and am enjoying the environment when I have the opportunity to play.

Neon Chrome, a free PS4 game, is my current quick pick up title, find it disposable and fun:

Neon Chrome is a ruthless top-down cyberpunk shooter with rogue-like elements. The game takes place inside an arcology – a massive sci-fi mega structure.

Blast your way through walls with guns and cybernetic abilities and try alternate approaches with different roles like the Assassin, Corporate Soldier or the Cyber Psycho. Upgrade your character stats, discover new cybernetic enhancements and build up strength to finally face the Overseer. Every death is a new beginning – the path to defeating the Overseer is never the same.

Professionally I’m working on a Data Science course, having fun with Python, Pandas, and Numpy. Awesome to be picking up skills and knowledge that I can apply to my daily work 🙂

Yesterday I fucked up… a little

I’ve been playing with a Python script to re-arrange the films in my movie directory; it moves everything of a selected file type from directory and sub-directory to a selected directory.

Useful eh?

Thought I might use it to group all of my photos too.

Last night I ran it on a drives root directory for all *.txt files.

Let me rephrase that, I moved every text file from all directories to my root directory.

This was only a backup drive, but I expect there might be a few programs that fail, as config files may have moved… on the upside, I know a good place to look for them is the folder in the root directory named ‘txt files’ 🙂

retro need

Tired of current gen titles, plus mates have borrowed the games I fancied playing, I setup my XBOX 360 and PS3 again.

Such an awesome collection of titles, I can’t wait to introduce to the boy.

Found it mad that there are a few of them that I’ve bought the PS4 remakes of 🙂

This then took me down a retro root and I installed a Linux MAME emulator to go back to my favourite platform title Wardner.

Not everyone sees the beauty of the game, but I have fond memories of playing a Japanese version of it at lunch, and after school, being able to get through the full game on 10p.

The rest of my game time as been committed to Elite Dangerous.
A colleague is new to the game, so I logged on with the intention of passing on some credits to help him on his way.

Within the first hour I made 3 insurance claims on expensive ships, simply because I’d forgotten the controls.

Mitigation kicked in and I bought a Sidewinder to bring back the muscle memory and remember what the fuck I was doing.

2.4 is in alpha testing, to be released soon, named ‘The Return’ – Thargoids are coming!
So naturally I’ve been hooked again in preparation.

I’m running a Clipper with 2 class 6 First Class cabins, with a single jump I’m making as much as 2.5MM credits, inching up the rank with each departure of passengers.

I’m tempted to follow the Road to Riches, for something different to do, I always enjoyed flying the Asp… also fancy climbing back in a Diamondback and getting my combat skillz back up to speed; think that could be useful with the Thargoids return.

Great that these are not mutually exclusive as my bank balance is looking healthy enough to kit out a few ships to a high grade.

I’ve been tempted to go down the Python route, although not sure why I’m reluctant… maybe it’s the idea that I’ll then have to grind engineers to better equip the ship?

I’ve also joined the Mobius group, which means I can play on-line without the distraction and stife of players who would want to blow away, or steal, my hard earned credits.

Status

I got thinking after my last post of why I chose Unity, and could Python be an option as a language to build games?

I have much more need for Python on a daily basis… although I’m currently limited to ver 2.7 at work, I do use it for the current Feed2Twitter Raspberry Pi setup.

So for the past few days I’ve been digging around searching for material and tutorials to play with.

One impressive example comes from a post on the Ubuntu Forums from over 7 years ago:

I was experimenting with Python over the last week, and I made this example app for various 3D stuff. I titled it PolarisGP, and I was making it with lax intentions of making a flight racing game. However, in case I lose interest, I’d like to put it out there for posterity.

It includes some examples of pretty cool techniques:

Basic linear algebra

Quaternion rotation

Axis/magnitude angular velocity

Display lists

.obj file loading

Efficiently extracting “up,left,forward” vectors from a matrix

Using an inverse matrix (in this case, from a quaternion) to create a camera system

Thanks CurvedInfinity wherever you are now 🙂

I’ve uploaded the code to GitHub as it’s easier to share… & I wanted to get more familiar with the hosting code: https://github.com/gamer-geek/PolarisGP

Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, which is primarily used to develop video games and simulations for computers, consoles and mobile devices. First announced only for OS X, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2005, it has since been extended to target 27 platforms.

Six major versions of Unity have been released. At the 2006 WWDC show, Apple named Unity as the runner up for its Best Use of Mac OS X Graphics category.

Unity is marketed to be an all purpose engine, and as a result supports both 2D and 3D graphics, drag and drop functionality and scripting through its 3 custom languages. The engine targets the following APIs: Direct3D and Vulkan on Windows and Xbox 360; OpenGL on Mac, Linux, and Windows; OpenGL ES on Android and iOS; and proprietary APIs on video game consoles. Within 2D games, Unity allows importation of sprites and an advanced 2D world renderer. For 3D games, Unity allows specification of texture compression and resolution settings for each platform that the game engine supports,[7] and provides support for bump mapping, reflection mapping, parallax mapping, screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO), dynamic shadows using shadow maps, render-to-texture and full-screen post-processing effects. Unity also offers services to developers, these are: Unity Ads, Unity Analytics, Unity Certification, Unity Cloud Build, Unity Everyplay, Unity IAP, Unity Multiplayer, Unity Performance Reporting and Unity Collaborate which is in beta.

Unity is the default software development kit (SDK) for Nintendo’s Wii U video game console platform, with a free copy included by Nintendo with each Wii U developer license. Unity Technologies calls this bundling of a third-party SDK an “industry first”

I’ve been playing with one of my Raspberry Pi’s; have an headless installation of Raspian running: Jessie Lite.
Currently setup a twitter feed (GamerGeekNews) from some of my favourite sites and am looking for other ideas.